Shame Storm • Hacker News Board

Re: Shame Storm

#221

Post by zestyping » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 3:58 AM UTC

gred wrote: post #215

zestyping wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird to me that almost all posting/commenting platforms are about the same. You get a series of small boxes with text in them and a small box to type into, usually too small to fit more than a couple of sentences, perhaps a button to promote, a button to reshare, and that's it. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Disqus... all the same. We've explored so little of the design space. If I had to hazard in extrapo…

> Every comment must be approved by its parent. Design twist: every comment must be approved by the commenter's parent -- father or mother.

Hahahaha! >_<

Re: Shame Storm

#222

Post by apatters » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 4:01 AM UTC

NathanKP wrote: post #135

zestyping wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird to me that almost all posting/commenting platforms are about the same. You get a series of small boxes with text in them and a small box to type into, usually too small to fit more than a couple of sentences, perhaps a button to promote, a button to reshare, and that's it. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Disqus... all the same. We've explored so little of the design space. If I had to hazard in extrapo…

> We've explored so little of the design space. The design space that we are willing to explore is limited by the fundamental evolutionary drive of social media platforms to hold your attention as long as possible by feeding you little hits of dopamine for minimal effort. Social media platforms thrive on size and activity and neither can be established by raising the bar, only by lowering it to new depths.

On the other hand, Mastodon doesn't have this drive. Facebook, Twitter et al are designed to be addictive because higher engagement translates to higher ad revenue. But Mastodon is ad free and the cost of operating the service is defrayed over thousands of inexpensive, federated instances, so there's less pressure to generate revenue of any kind.

Unfortunately Mastodon chose to clone Twitter's design and the Tweetdeck UI, so the tendency toward short-form, low information comments is carried over from Twitter. I too believe that these design patterns encourage toxic behavior. A simple experiment for any short-form social platform would be to lift any post character limit, make longer posts more readable, and prioritize longer comments in the ranking algorithm, and see what influence that has on the toxicity of the overall experience.

I mean if ten thousand people have responded to something, I would really rather read a few responses where someone made the effort to type out a few hundred words and what they wrote became popular. This doesn't guarantee it will be sane, cogent, etc. but it's better than staring at a wall of one line haters and trolls, which Twitter harassment victims always reference as one of the most traumatic parts of the experience.

Re: Shame Storm

#223

Post by warp_factor » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 4:08 AM UTC

beat wrote: post #117

warp_factor wrote: post #28

The issue is also that people got more and more sensitive over ybrast decades. Political correctness seems to be at a all time high. Try to say openly in the bay area that you support Trump and you will be shamed like never before. Shaming is now always in our mind and I find myself thinking more and more about redacting what I say to make it "unshameful" in order to avoid any possibility of shaming.

I don't think that's the same thing. It does point to a basic intellectual failing of the modern right, though... conflating being judged with being censored. Nobody's taking away your right to free speech. We just reserve the right to think you're an asshole for saying it.

Well, this is why the country is so divided. Instead of having a debate, the new way of doing is to directly go to the conclusion that "you must be an asshole". Good Proof of openmindness...

Not targeting a specific side btw, this is a trend on the left as well as on the right.

Re: Shame Storm

#224

Post by sethrin » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 4:46 AM UTC

overgard wrote: post #219

sethrin wrote: post #36

I think that the actual issue is the collective desire for punishment, and our inability to forgive others. From what I can see, forgiveness is something that we should strive to achieve as soon as possible after an offense. It's far too easy to hold people in public contempt, or prison, far longer than their just deserts.

I think forgiveness assumes that most of these “righteous“ crusaders are actually personally angry though, which is rarely the case. It’s frequently just virtue signalling in a way that sociopathically ignores that a real human beings’ reputation is at stake and the massive consequences of that.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure how you could know that, or why it would be a precondition to forgiveness. Assuming that large numbers of people are dishonest and sociopathic may not be incorrect, but acting as if that were true seems pretty misguided.

The problem of forgiveness is forgiving atrocity. Yeshua bar Youssif suggested that one should "turn the other cheek," that is, not just to immediately forgive the offense, but to immediately give the perpetrator the opportunity to commit the same offense again. The application of this precept to persons such as Robert Bowers is a sickening thought -- clearly we must not condone atrocity in the name of forgiveness. Yet we must come in time to forgive, and indeed, sooner than our wont. The matter is a frequent and weighty concern for me; I don't have any answers.

Re: Shame Storm

#225

Post by b_tterc_p » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 5:11 AM UTC

jerf wrote: post #47

As I've mentioned before, one of the interesting things I like to study in a casual way is the effect of social community structures on behavior. At this point it is not terribly controversial that modern social media systems encourage shame storms, via things like easy "viral" sharing, the existence of moderation systems that can be used to nuke any attempt to defend oneself out of existence, and the way modern soci…

I would take a more pessimistic view. The platform enables and encourages toxic behavior, but at the end of the day, is plagued by toxic people who feel very insecure and thus need to show virtue signaling in its strongest form; who have little self control over their own emotions; and who have a strong desire to assert themselves. A large proportion of people get their opinions from garbage news and don’t care to think critically. Putting opposing groups of these people in a large scale forum of any variety will result in trouble.

Re: Shame Storm

#226

Post by emerged » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 5:17 AM UTC

It's becoming increasingly clear that a fully connected graph is not the ideal form for productive human social organization.

Re: Shame Storm

#227

Post by phs318u » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 5:29 AM UTC

A few thoughts just bubbled up while reading this.

1. Everyone is potentially a journalist. Smartphone & social media = capture & comment.

2. Everyone is potentially a celebrity. Virality = celebrity.

3. Everyone is potentially a publisher. Share, post, retweet = publish.

4. Almost no one is (cares to be) an editor.

It seems to me that though the obvious impact of these is exactly what you'd expect (a permanent social shit-stain), the times they are-a-changing. Belief is no longer a matter of truthiness but almost a lifestyle/fashion choice. People are learning to tune-out whatever it is they consider fake-news. I suspect that the amplified impact of modern "shame storms" will be discounted by the levels of latent disbelief held by people.

i.e. people could (soon) care less.

Maybe?

EDITED: fixed line-break formatting. Why do I keep falling for the same thing?

Re: Shame Storm

#228

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 5:43 AM UTC

zozbot123 wrote: post #51

weberc2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to make heads or tails of this without a better definition of what constitutes "doubling down" or "working quite well". The example that comes to mind is James Damore and he "doubled down" in the sense that he stood by his original statements (which made sense because his original memo was clearly and explicitly not endorsing the things he was accused of endorsing). It "worked out quite well" in that he _on…

Do you think that James Damore would have been better off had he apologized and groveled to the mob of shamers? Even after he lost his job? (which there was no chance of avoiding - as you say, he went against the CEO of "one of the most prominent companies in the world".) That seems rather implausible if you know how these mobs generally behave. Forbearance - of the sort you might expect from an individual who has be…

[deleted]

Re: Shame Storm

#229

Post by hnuser1234 » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 8:13 AM UTC

jf- wrote: post #217

hnuser1234 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you prevent the moderators from being corrupted by any influence and stay perfectly objective? You say every forum needs a moderator, I say every moderator is, or quickly becomes, unacceptably corrupt. Maybe we could come up with some really basic rules for these popular sites, and implement them algorithmically, but good luck dealing with that PR shitstorm.

What’s your point, that we can’t ensure perfect rules so let’s not have any? By extension we can’t ensure perfect government or laws so let’s not bother? I’m looking for a more charitable interpretation but there isn’t one. Maybe some level of democratisation or at least community engagement, but there will always be people who are dissatisfied.

The only hard rule I'll agree to is no direct threats of violence.

Shame storms would be most effectively fought with better education, not moderators. Don't make judgements based on hearsay. Internet moderators don't help when a shame storm grows larger than the internet.

Bit from the article:

The solution, then, is not to try to make shame storms well targeted, but to make it so they happen as infrequently as possible. Editors should refuse to run stories that have no value except humiliation, and readers should refuse to click on them. It is, after all, the moral equivalent of contributing your rock to a public stoning. We should all develop a robust sense of what is and is not any of our business. Shame can be useful—and even necessary—but it is toxic unless a relationship exists between two people first. A Twitter mob is no more a basis for salutary shaming than an actual mob is for reasoned discussion. That would be true even if the shaming’s relics were not preserved forever by Google, making any kind of rehabilitation impossible.

Re: Shame Storm

#230

Post by maconic » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 8:27 AM UTC

I don't know if there is a good fix for it, but labels are a very potent weapon. In the U.S. a few decades ago, calling someone a communist sympathizer was a dangerous label. In China in the 1950s being called a rightist was a dangerous label. Today being called a racist, a pedophile, a Nazi, etc. are still dangerous labels. In this article cited the author was labeled a sociopath by an ex-boyfriend and also of being cruel ("cruelty-based view of the world"). These labels are difficult to undo because they are so easy to remember. If you live in a small village and, let's say, get labeled a derogatory term like a "slut" ... that quickly propagates until every villager accepts it as common wisdom that you are. So I do like the discussion about how to engineer a better social system, but it would require censoring label accusations until they had been proven, and this goes up against another part of the social system of supporting free speech. So I think you'd have to ban negative labels in the way that we don't legally allow hate speech (in the U.S.) despite the First Amendment because of the way it causes disproportionate and long-term harm to the victim. I don't see any other realistic solution to a problem that has existed ever since humans formed social groups and speak languages... being ostracized, exiled, or worse has been the outcome of shaming for the last 100k years. I don't see a great way to avoid it other than to just walk on eggshells and always be really nice to everybody or develop the reputation of a maverick... tough but honest and fair (like Sen. John McCain was known for). Regardless, you have to fit yourself into some admirable persona that society values to avoid shaming. If there are other people that get shamed because they don't fit into one of the socially admirable personas, perhaps the best way to address it is to expand the list of socially admirable personas.